The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 73

"Not yet. Still early days," he said, and then touched her cheek to rea.s.sure her.

The idea of living in the district horrified him. Yet he knew if he remained a doctor to the immigrant poor, only in some such warren could he maintain life for himself, a wife, and a child. Next morning he regarded the district with fear as well as rage, and despair grew in him that matched the hopelessness he saw everywhere in the mean streets and alleyways.

He began to sleep restlessly at night, disturbed by nightmares. Two dreams recurred again and again. On a bad night, he had them both. When he couldn't sleep, he lay in the dark and went over the events in detail again and again, so that finally he couldn't tell whether he was asleep or awake.

Early morning. Gray weather, but with an optimistic sun. He stands among several thousand men outside the Carron Iron Works, where large-caliber ships' guns are made for the English navy. It begins well. A man atop a crate is reading the broadside Rob J. had written anonymously to bring men to the demonstration: "Friends and Countrymen. Roused from the state in which we have been held for so many years, we are compelled, by the extremity of our positions and the contempt heaped upon our pet.i.tions, to a.s.sert our rights at the hazard of our lives." The man's voice is high and cracks at times to reveal his fright. He is cheered when he is done. Three pipers play, the a.s.sembled men singing l.u.s.tily, at first hymns and then more spirited stuff, ending with "Scots Wha' Hae Wi' Wallace Bled." The authorities have seen Rob's broadside and have made preparations. There are armed policemen, militia, the First Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, and well-trained cavalry soldiers of the Seventh Hussars and the Tenth Hussars, veterans of European wars. The soldiers wear gorgeous uniforms. The high polished boots of the hussars gleam like rich dark mirrors. The troops are younger than the policemen, but their faces contain an identical hard contempt. The trouble starts when Rob's friend Andrew Gerould of Lanark makes a speech about the destruction of farms and the inability of laboring men to live on the mite given for work that enriches England and makes Scotland ever poorer. As Andrew's voice grows in heat, the men start to roar their anger and to shout, "Liberty or death!" The dragoons edge their horses forward, pushing the demonstrators from the fence surrounding the iron works. Someone hurls a rock. It strikes a hussar, who drops from his saddle. Immediately the other hors.e.m.e.n draw swords with a rattle, and a shower of stones fells other soldiers, spattering blood on blue, crimson, and gold uniforms. The militia begins to fire into the crowd. The cavalrymen are hacking. Men scream and weep. Rob is hemmed in. He can't flee on his own. He can only allow himself to be swept beyond the vengeance of the soldiers, fighting to keep his feet, knowing that if he stumbles he will be trampled by the terror of the running mob.

The second dream is worse.

Amidst a large a.s.semblage again. As many as had been at the iron works, but this time men and women standing before eight gallow trees raised at Stirling Castle, the crowd contained by militia formed up all around the square. A minister, Dr. Edward Bruce of Renfrew, sits and reads silently. Opposite him sits a man in black. Rob J. recognizes him before he takes refuge behind a black mask; he is Bruce Something-or-other, an impoverished medical student who is earning fifteen pounds as executioner. Dr. Bruce leads the people in the 130th Psalm: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord." Each of the condemned is given the customary gla.s.s of wine and then led onto the platform, where eight coffins wait. Six prisoners choose not to speak. A man named Hardie looks out over the sea of faces and says in a m.u.f.fled voice, "I die a martyr to the cause of justice." Andrew Gerould speaks clearly. He appears weary and older than his twenty-three years. "My friends, I hope none of you has been hurt. After this is done, please go quietly to your homes and read your Bibles." Caps are placed over their heads. Two of them call farewell as the nooses are fixed. Andrew says nothing more. At a signal it is done, and five die without struggle. Three kick for a time. Andrew's New Testament falls from his nerveless fingers into the silent crowd. After they are cut down, the executioner chops through each neck with an ax, one by one, and holds up the terrifying object by the hair, saying every time as the law prescribes: "This is the head of a traitor!"

Sometimes when Rob J. escaped from the dream he lay in the narrow bed under the eaves, touching his limbs and trembling with relief that he was alive. Staring up into the darkness, he wondered how many people no longer were living because he had written the broadside. How many destinies had been changed, how many lives were ended because he had projected his beliefs onto so many people? The accepted morality said that principles were worth fighting for, dying for. Yet when everything else was taken into account, was not life the single most precious possession a human being owned? And as a doctor wasn't he committed to protect and preserve life above all? He swore to himself and to Aesculapius, the father of healing, that he would never again cause a human being to die because of a difference in beliefs, never again even strike another person in anger, and for the thousandth time he marveled at what a hard way it had been for Bruce Something-or-other to have earned fifteen pounds.

7.

THE COLOR OF THE PAINTING.

"It is not your money that you spend!" Mr. Wilson told him sourly one morning as he handed over a sheaf of appointment slips. "It is money given to the dispensary by leading citizens. The charity's funds are not to be wasted at the whim of a doctor in our employ."

"I've never wasted the charity's money. I've never treated or prescribed for any patient who wasn't genuinely ill and badly in need of our help. Your system is bad. It sometimes has me treating somebody with a strained muscle while others die for lack of treatment."

"You exceed yourself, sir." Mr. Wilson's eyes and voice were calm, but his hand holding the slips trembled. "Do you understand that in future you must limit your visits to the names on the slips I a.s.sign to you each morning?"

Rob desperately desired to tell Mr. Wilson what he understood, and what Mr. Wilson might best do with his appointment slips. But in view of the complications in his life, he didn't dare. Instead, he forced himself to nod and to turn away. Stuffing the sheaf of slips into his pocket, he made his way into the district.

That evening, everything changed. Margaret Holland came to his room and sat on the edge of his bed, her place for announcements.

"I'm bleedin."

He forced himself to think first as a doctor. "Are you hemorrhaging, losing a great deal of blood?"

She shook her head. "At first, a little heavier than usual. Then, like my regular bleedin. Almost done now."

"When did it begin?"

"Four days past."

"Four days!" Why had she waited four days to tell him? She didn't look at him. She sat absolutely still, as if steeling herself against his fury, and he realized she'd spent the four days struggling with herself. "Came close to not telling me at all, didn't you."

She didn't answer, but he understood. Despite his being strange, a handwashing Protestant, he had been an opportunity for her eventually to escape the prison of her poverty. Having been forced to peer into that prison at close range, it was a wonder to him that she'd been able to tell him the truth at all, so that instead of anger at her delay, what he felt was admiration, overwhelming grat.i.tude. He went to her, lifted her to her feet, and kissed her reddened eyes. Then he put his arms about her and held her, patting her gently from time to time, as if comforting a frightened child.

Next morning he wandered, light-headed, at times his knees weak with relief. Men and women smiled at his greeting. It was a new world, with a brighter sun and more benevolent air to breathe.

He took care of his patients with his usual attentiveness, but in between each case his mind was racing. Finally he sat on a wooden stoop on Broad Street and contemplated the past, the present, and his future.

For the second time he had escaped a terrible fate. He felt he had received a warning that his existence must be carefully, more respectfully used.

He thought of his life as a large painting in progress. Whatever happened to him, the finished picture would be of medicine, but he sensed that if he stayed in Boston the painting would be rendered in shades of gray.

Amelia Holmes could arrange what she called "a brilliant match" for him, but having escaped an unloving impoverished marriage, he had no desire to cold-bloodedly seek out an unloving rich one or to allow himself to be sold on Boston society's marriage market, medical meat at so much per pound.

He wanted his life to be painted with the strongest colors he could find.

When he was through with his work that afternoon, he went to the Athenaeum and reread the books that had so captured his interest. Long before he finished them, he knew where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do.

That night as Rob lay in his bed, there was a familiar small signal at the door. He stared up at the darkness without moving. The scratching knock sounded a second time, and then a third.

For several reasons he wanted to go to the door and open it. But he lay without moving, frozen into a moment as bad as any of those in the nightmares, and eventually Margaret Holland went away.

It took him more than a month to make his preparations and resign from the Boston Dispensary. In lieu of a farewell party, on a brutally cold December evening he, Holmes, and Harry Loomis dissected the body of a Negro slave named Delia. She had labored all her life and the body had remarkable musculature. Harry had demonstrated a genuine interest and talent in anatomy and would replace Rob J. as docent at the medical school. Holmes lectured as they cut, showing them that the fimbriated end of the Fallopian tube was "like the fringe of a poor woman's shawl." Every organ and muscle reminded one of them of a story, a poem, an anatomical pun, or a scatological joke. It was serious scientific work, they were meticulous about every detail, yet while they worked they roared with laughter and good feeling. Following the dissection they repaired to the Ess.e.x Tavern and drank mulled wine until closing. Rob promised to stay in touch with both Holmes and Harry when he arrived at a permanent destination, and to call on both of them with problems if the need should arise. They parted in such fellowship that Rob was regretful about his decision.

In the morning he walked to Washington Street and bought some roasted chestnuts, bringing them back to the house on Spring Street in a twist of paper torn from the Boston Transcript. He stole into Meggy Holland's room and left them under the pillow of her bed.

Shortly after noon he climbed aboard a railroad car, which presently was pulled out of the train yards by a steam locomotive. The conductor who collected his ticket looked askance at his luggage, for he had declined to put either his viola da gamba or his box into the baggage car. In addition to his surgical instruments and clothing, the trunk now contained Old h.o.r.n.y and half a dozen bars of strong brown soap, the same kind Holmes used. So though he had little cash, he was leaving Boston far wealthier than when he had arrived.

It was four days before Christmas. The train glided past houses in which wreaths decorated doors and Yule trees could be glimpsed through windows along the track. Soon the city was left behind. Despite a lightly falling snow, in less than three hours they made Worcester, the terminus of the Boston Railroad. Pa.s.sengers had to transfer to the Western Railroad, and in the new train Rob sat next to a portly man who promptly offered him a flask.

"No, thank you kindly," he said, but accepted conversation to take the sting from the refusal. The man was a drummer of wrought nails-clasp, clinch, double-headed, countersunk, diamond, and rose, in sizes ranging from tiny needle nails to huge boat spikes-and showed Rob his samples, a good way to while away the miles.

"Traveling west! Traveling west!" the salesman said. "You too?"

Rob J. nodded. "How far do you go?"

"Just about the end of the state! Pittsfield. You, sir?"

It gave him an inordinate amount of satisfaction to answer, so much pleasure that he grinned and had to restrain from shouting for all to hear, as the words played their own music and shed a fine romantic light in every corner of the rocking railroad car.

"Indian country," he said.

8.

MUSIC.

He progressed through Ma.s.sachusetts and New York via a series of short railroads connected by stagecoach lines. It was hard traveling in the winter. At times a stage had to wait while as many as a dozen oxen dragged plows to clear drifts or packed down the snow with great wooden rollers. Inns and taverns were expensive. He was in the forest of the Allegheny Plateau in Pennsylvania when he ran out of money and deemed himself lucky to find work in Jacob Starr's timber camp, doctoring lumberjacks. When there was an accident, it was likely to be serious, but in between there was little for him to do, and he sought out labor, joining the crews in hewing down white pines and hemlocks that had lived more than two hundred and fifty years. Usually he manned one end of a "misery whip," or two-man saw. His body hardened and thickened. Most camps didn't have a doctor, and the lumberjacks knew how valuable he was to them, and protected him as he worked at their dangerous trade. They taught him to soak his bleeding palms in brine till they toughened. In the evenings he juggled in the bunkhouse to keep his callused fingers dexterous for surgery, and he played his viola da gamba for them, alternating accompaniments of their raunchy bellowed songs with selections by J. S. Bach and Marais, to which they listened raptly.

All winter they stockpiled huge logs on the banks of a stream. On the back of every single-bitted ax head in camp, raised in steel, was a large five-pointed star. Each time a tree was felled and trimmed, the men reversed their axes and slammed the embossed star into the fresh-cut b.u.t.t, marking it as a Starr log. When the spring melt came, the stream rose eight feet, carrying the logs to the Clarion River. Huge log rafts were a.s.sembled, and on them were built bunkhouses, cookhouses, and supply shacks. Rob rode the rafts downriver like a prince, a slow, dreamlike journey interrupted only when the logs jammed and piled up, to be unsnarled by the skilled, patient boom-men. He saw all manner of birds and animals, drifting down the serpentine Clarion until it joined the Allegheny, and riding the logs down the Allegheny all the way to Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh he said good-bye to Starr and his lumberjacks. In a saloon he was hired as physician to a track-laying crew of the Washington & Ohio Railroad, a line seeking to compete with the state's two busy ca.n.a.ls. With a work crew he was taken into Ohio, to the beginning of a great openness bisected by two shining rails. Rob was given living quarters with the bosses aboard four railroad cars. Springtime on the great plain was beautiful, but the world of the W&O RR was ugly. The track layers, graders, and teamsters were immigrant Irish and Germans whose lives were regarded as a cheap commodity. Rob's responsibility was to ensure that the last ounces of their strength were available for laying track. He welcomed the pay, but the job was doomed from the start, for the superintendent, a dark-visaged man named Cotting, was a piece of nastiness who wouldn't spend money on food. The railroad employed hunters who killed plenty of wild meat, and there was a chicory drink that pa.s.sed for coffee. But save at the table shared by Cotting, Rob, and the managers, there were no greens, no cabbage, no carrots, no potatoes, nothing to supply as...o...b..c acid except, as a very rare treat, a pot of beans. The men had scurvy. Though anemic, they had no appet.i.tes. Their joints were sore, their gums bled, their teeth were falling out, and their injuries wouldn't heal. They were literally being murdered by malnutrition and heavy work. Finally Rob J. broke into the locked supply car with a crowbar and pa.s.sed out crates of cabbages and potatoes until the bosses' own foodstuffs were gone. Fortunately, Cotting didn't know his young physician had taken a vow of nonviolence. Rob's size and condition and the cold contempt in his eyes made the superintendent decide it was easier to pay him off and be rid of him than to fight him.

He'd earned barely enough money from the railroad to buy a slow old mare, a used twelve-gauge muzzle-loading rifle and a light little goose gun with which to hunt smaller game, needles and thread, a fishline and hooks, a rusty iron frying pan, and a hunting knife. He named the horse Monica Grenville, in honor of a beautiful older woman, his mother's friend, whom for years he had dreamed of riding during the fevered fantasies of his adolescence. Monica Grenville the horse allowed him to work his way west on his own terms. He shot game easily after discovering that the rifle pulled to the right, and caught fish if there was opportunity, and he earned money or goods wherever he came to people who needed a doctor.

The size of the country stunned him, mountain and valley and plain. After a few weeks he became convinced he could go on as long as he lived, riding Monica Grenville ploddingly and eternally in the direction of the setting sun.

He ran out of pharmaceuticals. It was hard enough performing surgery without the aid of the few inadequate palliatives that were available, but he had neither laudanum nor morphine nor any other drug and had to rely on his swiftness as a surgeon and whatever rotgut whiskey he was able to buy as he went along. Fergusson had taught him a few helpful tricks that he remembered. Lacking tincture of nicotine, given by mouth as a muscle relaxant to slacken the a.n.a.l sphincter during an operation for fistula, he bought the strongest cigars he could find and inserted one into the patient's r.e.c.t.u.m until the nicotine was absorbed from the tobacco and relaxation took place. Once in t.i.tusville, Ohio, an elderly citizen happened upon him overseeing a patient who was bent over a wagon shaft, the cigar protruding.

"Do you have a match, sir?" Rob J. asked him.

Later, at the general store, he heard the old man tell his friends solemnly, "You would never believe how they was smokin em."

In a tavern in Zanesville, he saw his first Indian, a crushing disappointment. In contrast to James Fenimore Cooper's splendid savages, the man was a soft-fleshed, sullen drunkard with snot on his face, a pitiful creature taking abuse while begging drinks.

"Delaware, I guess," the saloonkeeper said when Rob asked him the Indian's tribe. "Miami, mebbe. Or Shawnee." He shrugged contemptuously. "Who cares? The mizzable b.a.s.t.a.r.ds is all a same to me."

A few days later, in Columbus, Rob discovered a stout black-bearded young Jew named Jason Maxwell Geiger, an apothecary with a well-stocked pharmacy.

"You have laudanum? You have tincture of nicotine? Pota.s.sium iodide?" No matter what he requested, Geiger answered with a smile and a nod, and Rob wandered happily among the jars and retorts. Prices were lower than he would have feared, for Geiger's father and brothers were manufacturers of pharmaceuticals in Charleston, and he explained that whatever he couldn't make himself, he was able to order from his family at favorable terms. So Rob J. put in a good supply. It was when the pharmacist helped carry his purchases to the horse that Geiger saw the wrapped bulk of the musical instrument and turned at once to his visitor. "Surely it's a viol?"

"Viola da gamba," Rob said, and saw something new enter the man's eyes, not exactly cupidity, but a wistful yearning so powerful as to be unmistakable. "Would you care to see it?"

"You must bring it into the house, show it to my wife," Geiger said eagerly. He led the way to the dwelling behind the apothecary shop. Inside, Lillian Geiger held a dish towel across her bodice as they were introduced, but not before Rob J. had noticed the stains from her leaking b.r.e.a.s.t.s. In a cradle slept their two-month-old daughter, Rachel. The house smelled of Mrs. Geiger's milk and fresh-baked hallah. The dark parlor contained a horsehair sofa and chair and a square piano. The woman slipped into the bedroom and changed her dress while Rob J. unwrapped the viol; then she and her husband examined the instrument, running their fingers over the seven strings and ten frets as if they were stroking a newly recovered family icon. She showed him her piano, with its carefully oiled dark walnut wood. "Made by Alpheus Babc.o.c.k of Philadelphia," she said. Jason Geiger brought another instrument to light from behind the piano. "It was made by a brewer of beer named Isaac Schwartz who lives in Richmond, Virginia. It's just a fiddle, not good enough to be called a violin. Someday I hope to own a violin." But in a moment, when they were tuning up, Geiger drew sweet sounds.

They regarded one another warily lest they prove to be musically incompatible.

"What?" Geiger asked him, giving the visitor the courtesy.

"Bach? Do you know this prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier? It's from Book II, I forget the number." He played them the opening, and at once Lillian Geiger joined in and, nodding, so did her husband. The twelfth, Lillian mouthed. Rob J. cared nothing about identifying the piece, for this kind of playing was not to entertain lumberjacks. It was at once apparent that the man and woman were accomplished and accustomed to accompanying one another, and he was certain he'd make an a.s.s of himself. Wherever their music progressed, his followed tardily and jerkily. His fingers, instead of flowing along the musical path, seemed to make spastic leaps, like salmon fighting their way up a falls. But halfway through the prelude he forgot his fear, for the habits of many long years of playing overcame the clumsiness caused by lack of practice. Soon he was able to observe that Geiger played with his eyes closed, while his wife wore on her face a look of glazed pleasure that was at the same time sharing and intensely private.

The satisfaction was almost like pain. He hadn't realized how much he had missed music. When they finished they sat and grinned at one another. Geiger hurried out to put a Closed sign on the door of his shop, Lillian went to check on her child and to place a roast in the oven, Rob unsaddled and fed poor patient Monica. When they came back, it turned out the Geigers knew nothing by Marin Marais, while Rob J. had memorized none of the works of that Polish fellow, Chopin. But they all three knew Beethoven's sonatas. All afternoon they constructed for themselves a shimmering, special place. By the time the wailing of the hungry infant interrupted their play, they were drunk with the heady beauty of their own sounds.

The pharmacist wouldn't hear of his leaving. The evening meal was pink lamb tasting faintly of rosemary and garlic and roasted with little carrots and new potatoes, and a blueberry compote. "You will sleep in our guest room," Geiger said.

Drawn toward them, Rob asked Geiger about opportunities for physicians in the area.

"Lots of people hereabouts, Columbus being state capital, and a number of doctors already are here to take care of em. It's a good place for a pharmacy, but we're going to be leaving Columbus ourselves when our baby is old enough to survive the trip. I want to be a farmer as well as an apothecary, and I want land to leave to my children. Farmland in Ohio is just too d.a.m.ned high. I've been making a study of places where I can buy fertile land I can afford."

He had maps, which he opened on his table. "Illinois," he said, and pointed out to Rob J. the part of the state that his investigations had indicated the most desirable, a section between the Rocky River and the Mississippi. "A good supply of water. Beautiful woods lining the rivers. And the rest of it is prairie, black earth that's never felt a plow."

Rob J. studied the maps. "Maybe I ought to go there myself," he said finally. "See if I like it."

Geiger beamed. They spent a long time hunched over the maps, marking the best route, arguing good-naturedly. After Rob went to bed, Jay Geiger stayed up late and by candlelight copied the music of a Chopin mazurka. They played it next morning after breakfast. Then the two men consulted the marked map one more time. Rob J. agreed that if Illinois proved to be as good as Geiger believed, he would settle there and write at once to his new friend, telling him to bring his family to the western frontier.

9.

TWO PARCELS.

Illinois was interesting right from the start. Rob entered the state in late summer, when the tough green stuff of the prairie was dried and bleached from too many long days in the sun. At Danville he watched men boiling down the water from saline springs in big black kettles, and when he left, he carried with him a packet of very pure salt. The prairie was rolling and, in places, adorned with low hills. The state was blessed with sweet water. Rob came to only a few lakes but saw a number of marshes feeding streams that merged into rivers. He learned that when people in Illinois spoke of the land between the rivers they most likely meant the southern tip of the state that lay between the Mississippi and the Ohio. It had deep, rich alluvial soils from both great rivers. Folks called the region Egypt, because they thought it was as fertile as the fabled soil of the great Nile delta. On Jay Geiger's map Rob J. saw that there were a number of "little Egypts" between rivers in Illinois. Somehow, during his brief encounter with Geiger the man had earned his respect, and he kept on traveling toward the region Jay had told him was the likeliest one for settlement.

It took him two weeks to work his way across Illinois. On the fourteenth day the trail he was on entered a fringe of woods, offering blessed coolness and the smell of moist growing things. Following the narrow track, he heard the sound of a lot of water, and presently he emerged on the eastern bank of a good-sized river that he guessed to be the Rocky.

It was dry season but the current was strong, and the great rocks that gave the river its name created white water. Riding Monica along the bank, he was trying to pick out a place that appeared fordable when he came to a deeper, slower section. Between two huge tree trunks on the opposite banks, a thick rope cable was suspended. An iron triangle and a piece of steel were hung from a branch next to a sign that read: HOLDEN'S CROSSING

Ring for Ferry

He clanged the triangle vigorously and, it seemed to him, for a long time before he saw a man leisurely making his way down the far bank, where the raft was moored. Two stout vertical posts on the raft ended in great iron rings through which pa.s.sed the suspended hawser, allowing the raft to slide along the rope as it was poled across the river. By the time the raft was mid-river, the current had pulled the rope downstream, so that the man moved the raft over an arc instead of making a straight crossing. In the middle, the dark oily waters were too deep to pole, and the man pulled the raft along slowly by hauling on the rope cable. The ferryman was singing, and baritone lyrics carried clearly to Rob J.

One day I was walkin, I heerd a complainin,

An saw a old woman the picture of gloom.

She gazed at the mud on her doorstep ('twas rainin)

An this was her song as she wielded her broom.